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This petition went up on the White House “We The People” website yesterday. They’re looking to get 100,000 signatures by April 19th. Since most politicians’ campaigns are largely funded by wealthy companies and individuals, it would give voters a better sense of who the candidate they are voting for is actually representing if the company’s logo, or individual’s name, was prominently displayed upon the candidate’s clothing at all public appearances and campaign events. Once elected, the candidate would be required to continue to wear those “sponsor’s” names during all official duties and visits to constituents. The size of a logo or name would vary with the size of a donation. For example, a $1 million dollar contribution would warrant a patch of about 4” by 8” on the chest, while a free meal from a lobbyist would be represented by a quarter-sized button. Individual donations under $1000 are exempt.

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There’s no shortage of cafes in Tokyo, but FabCafe has a little more on its menu than most. Opened just over a year ago, the establishment offers its own laser cutter that customers can rent by the hour, and also collaborates with the 3D printer showroom upstairs. The showroom is called Cube and features several printers made by South Carolina-based 3D Systems, making FabCafe a hot spot in Tokyo for anyone who needs something fabricated but can’t justify the multi-thousand dollar outlay on a machine of their own.

One and a half million laptops given to poor students by India’s largest state government crash if their users try to remove pre-loaded screen savers featuring pictures of the new chief minister.

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It’s hard to imagine how an entire city can get lost but that’s exactly what has happened to the lost cities on this list. There are actually many reasons why a city has to be abandoned. War, natural disasters, climate change and the loss of important trading partners to name a few. Whatever the cause, these lost cities were forgotten in time until they were rediscovered centuries later.

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When your life is nothing but trolling and viral videos, having a bad wi-fi connection can be incredibly irritating. Poor loading times, lost connections, and more can put a strain on your time browsing the internet. However, there are some ways to improve your Wi-Fi connection. However, even in the most bleak situation, there are heroes, and in this case it’s soda cans. If you’ve ever had a TV with an antenna or a radio, you’ve probably heard of the trick of using tin foil to improve the signal. Using a soda or beer can to improve your wi-fi signal works in a very similar way. The metal in the can and the shape of the can when cut open can focus the signal to and from your router. The only things that you’ll need to achieve this are a beer or soda can, a utility knife, a pair of scissors and some form of adhesive that can easily be removed like tape or adhesive putty.

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Authorities say the use of nitrous oxide as a recreational drug has grown from a rave party phenomenon to mainstream use, propelled by the ease of social media to reach young people. They say the drug has spurred fatal car accidents, rapes and teen deaths — all in the name of a temporary high that lasts just a few minutes and costs just a few dollars. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials have zeroed in on the recreational use of the drug since September, cracking down on more than 350 illegal parties, nearly all of which were selling nitrous oxide, or “noz,” spokesman Mike Parker said Thursday.

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Authorities found two-2 gallon jugs of PCP concealed in containers of Lipton Sweet Tea in Allen’s Porsche on Nov. 5, 2012 when they raided a storage locker on Lake Road in Vermilion. A loaded handgun was also recovered from the storage locker but was not stolen. Allen was arrested the same day during a traffic stop in Westlake on I-90 after authorities found another gallon of PCP in the back of his Escalade, according to Lorain County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Dennis Cavanaugh, who also heads the Lorain County Drug Task Force. A total of 111,364 milliliters of PCP were recovered in total. The drug sells for $120 to $140 a gram, said Cavanaugh.

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One gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, 25 grams of marijuana leaves or five grams of hashish: These are the drug quantities one can legally purchase and possess in Portugal, carrying them through the streets of Lisbon in a pants pocket, say, without fear of repercussion. MDMA — the active ingredient in ecstasy — and amphetamines — including speed and meth — can also be possessed in amounts up to one gram. That’s roughly enough of each of these drugs to last 10 days. These are the amounts listed in a table appended to Portugal’s Law 30/2000. Goulão participated in creating this law, which has put his country at the forefront of experimental approaches to drug control. Portugal paved a new path when it decided to decriminalize drugs of all kinds. “We figured perhaps this way we would be better able get things under control,” Goulão explains. “Criminalization certainly wasn’t working all that well.”

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As far as I can tell, police departments employ two main strategies when they’re under pressure to cut crime fast. In strategy no. 1, they flood crime zones with special police units that muscle criminals and contraband off the streets. In strategy no. 2, they simply downgrade crimes, or make it more difficult for citizens to report them. The Dallas police department chose the latter strategy last year when it announced that police officers would no longer respond in person to shoplifting incidents involving items worth $50 or less. Instead, victimized merchants were instructed to print a form off the DPD website, fill it out, and put it in the mail. According to the Dallas Morning News, the new process has been a huge hassle for merchants. “Retailers overwhelmingly described a time-consuming process with onerous paperwork requirements,” reported Tanya Eiserer and Steve Thompson.

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Over a third of Americans have a venereal disease, according to the CDC. At the present rate, those who have problems with their personal equipment will surpass those with jobs by the end of Obama’s second term. The CDC finding that 110,197,000 Americans have an STI (Sexually Transmitted Infection) was reported by CNS News. In 2008, the last year reported, 19.8 million Americans contracted STIs.

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Forty-five years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to “turn on, tune in and drop out”, researchers have found that magic mushrooms do change a user’s personality – for the better. The fungi have long been known for their psychedelic effects, but far from damaging the brain, the hallucinogenic drug they contain enhances feelings and aesthetic sensibilities, scientists say. The study, at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore, found that a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to cause positive effects for up to a year. “Psilocybin can facilitate experiences that change how people perceive themselves and their environment,” said Roland Griffiths, a study author and professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at Johns Hopkins. “That’s unprecedented.”

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We score all 50 states on over 200 policies encompassing fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom. We weight public policies according to the estimated costs that government restrictions on freedom impose on their victims.

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But what’s perhaps most troubling to Internet freedom advocates is how the new CFAA even expands the law to include accessing information for an “impermissible purpose,” which means even if you have the right to access the information in the first place, it’s still considered a crime if someone deems you are misusing your access in some way. According to Kerr, a computer law expert, the language in the new CFAA would make it a felony to “lie about your age on an online dating profile if you intended to contact someone online and ask them personal questions,” or if you violate the terms of service on a government website. “In short, this is a step backward, not a step forward,” Kerr said. “This is a proposal to give DOJ what it wants, not to amend the CFAA in a way that would narrow it.”

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In the new song, “You Don’t Even Know It,” by Rocko, Future, and Rick Ross, the self-proclaimed boss drops a troubling lyric that shows he knows very little about rape. Just after he opens his verse, Ross raps: “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.”

About two years ago, citizens in Cherán, Mexico decided to battle illegal logging and drug violence by kicking out the police and running the town according to indigenous tradition.

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The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees’ antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases. Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect’s exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn’t easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

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A selection of articles giving warning about the dangers of cloud computing… What’s going on with your notes, records, e-mail, photos, documents, videos, scans, etc.? Privacy, Encyption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 era Google connections to NSA/CIA Massachusetts Looking to Tax Cloud Services 51 Security Worries About Cloud Computing What’s In Your ‘Digital Wallet’? – Why They Are Pushing Digital Wallets… FBI Drive for Encryption Backdoors Is Deja Vu for Security Experts Postal Service to Host Public-Private ID Protection Network Encryption Could Drive Government to Break Into Your Cloud IRS Leaves Taxpayer Data Insecure, GAO Finds Is Your TV, Game System or Other Device Watching You? Feds: No Warrant Needed to Track Your Car with a GPS Device Driven by the Elite: Nasdaq on the Virtues of the Public Cloud The More You Encrypt, the More the Government Breaks Into Your Cloud Microsoft Details Law Enforcement Information Requests in New Report

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This was on my mind as much as the mysterious personality of David Bowie when an Irish cabbie drove Burroughs and me to Bowie’s London home on 17 November (“Strange blokes down this part of London, mate”). I had spent the last several weeks arranging this two-way interview. I had brought Bowie all of Burroughs’ novels: Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded and the rest. He’d only had time to read Nova Express. Burroughs for his part had heard only two Bowie songs, ‘Five Years’ and ‘Starman’, though he had read all of Bowie’s lyrics. Still they had expressed interest in meeting each other.

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Take the example to the left. This terrifying contraption is called a ‘jugum penis.’ It was designed to prevent both masturbation and ‘nocturnal incontinence.’ Should a man become aroused in the middle of the night, this contraption would clamp down, extinguishing both his desire as well as his erection in a very sudden and painful way! But why were the Victorians so obsessed with what they termed ‘self-abuse?’ Many medical practitioners during this period believed that masturbation caused a wide range of mental and physical disorders, and could even prove fatal over time. Doctors and surgeons alike devoted their lives to finding a ‘cure.’

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Deputies were called to the Crestwood Suites on University Boulevard after multiple 911 callers “reported screaming and growling sounds from a room on the second floor” of the hotel. They arrived to find the victim “covered in a significant amount of blood, with numerous bite wounds,” the report states. He was rushed to the Orlando Regional Medical Center trauma center. The man had “significant” bites to his penis and testicles, the report states, as well as damage to his leg, abdomen, chest and fingers. His alleged attacker, Priscilla Vaughn, “was nude, and had blood around her mouth, which had spread to her face and head,” the report states, adding Vaughn “growled and snarled” at deputies.

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A team of international researchers headed up by the University of Michigan has used noninvasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to release endogenous opioids — the human body’s most powerful, euphoria-inducing painkillers that are very similar to opiates such as morphine. This approach is significant because releasing these opioids is as simple as strapping a couple of damp sponges to your scalp and attaching a 9-volt battery.

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Of course, most people have no idea what the police can pull off of your phone when it’s searched, but the ACLU has, thankfully, revealed some documents that ICE filed in a court case. It turns out they can get quite a lot. Using a single “data extraction session” they were able to pull: call activity phone book directory information stored voicemails and text messages photos and videos apps eight different passwords 659 geolocation points, including 227 cell towers and 403 WiFi networks with which the cell phone had previously connected.

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Roadkill salvage and consumption remains a fringe activity, mainly practiced by so-called “freegans” and other culinary subcultures. In Alaska, however, those who utilize soup kitchens are likely to have had a taste, since fresh roadkill is regularly given to charities. Interestingly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which opposes most forms of hunting, has pushed states to adopt “roadkill salvage” legislation so as not to let animals go to waste.

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This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

CCTV footage released by West Midlands Police shows dozens of people running to be first in line as a drug dealer arrives in a Birmingham street.

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How is breast massage therapy performed? Breast massage therapy is performed with the patient lying flat on her back on a massage table. If the patient so desires, the massage may be performed with the breasts covered with a cloth. However, this greatly hinders the massage therapist and reduces the effectiveness of the massage. The massage therapist will usually start by massaging the area under the breast and over the breast with the palms of the hand. At any point in time if you are feeling uncomfortable or feel that too much of less pressure is being exerted, do not hesitate to tell your therapist. No therapist can read your mind. The therapist will then move to massage the sides of the breast. The next step of the massage is the breast lift. The therapist places his or her hands under your breasts and gently lifts them towards the ceiling. This helps to relieve stress from the breasts and promotes gentle stretching. Finally the therapist will gently massage the pectoral muscles.

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A dog in Oklahoma City came home on Saturday carrying a dead newborn in its mouth. A house sitter, whose name has not been released, was at the home at the time, KOCO reported. The house sitter told KFOR that the dog, a 6-month-old mixed-breed named Luke, showed up at the door with the body of a three to five-pound infant in his mouth. “He was carrying it just like a momma pup,” she told the station, “and laid it at my feet.”

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T.J. Lane will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing three students and wounding three others in the Chardon High School cafeteria Feb. 27, 2012. Before his sentence, Lane, wearing a white T-shirt with the word “killer” written across the front, said: “This hand that pulled the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory. F— all of you.”

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If any Foodie Flick could blow your mind, it’s this one. British comedian George Egg recently posted a YouTube video in which he cooks dinner in his hotel room. We’re not talking about a quick salad and sandwich here. Without bringing any special tools from home, Egg sweeps aside the overpriced room-service menu and makes pasta and biscuits in his room — from scratch. No hot plate. No microwave. If it wasn’t captured in a video, we probably wouldn’t believe it. The entrée? A tortellini pasta with spinach, rocket and crème fraîche that he cooks in the room’s tea kettle. This might not leave a desirable taste for the next poor sap who makes tea, but it’s a rather ingenious way to boil noodles. (He adds a raw egg yolk in a nod to carbonara; emulate that at your own risk.) Oh, but there’s more: Egg ups the ante by making biscuits (kneaded, risen, the whole 9 yards), using a clothes iron. Color us a new shade of impressed.

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The tools you need are simple: an electric drip coffee maker with hot plate, a coffee filter, 2 1-liter glass sample jars with air-tight lids, 2 handkerchiefs, 2 rubber bands, and a source of clean (preferably R/O) water. You’ll have to be more creative with your ingredients. Your need grains, malt, hops, and something for flavor. Simple grains such as those found in common cereals – Raisin Bran, Cracked Wheat, Kashi, whatever you can find – are decent sources of starches and usually contain enough enzymes to break the most complex proteins down. Fruit and nuts will add flavor, but are not important. The grains should be ground as fine as possible, rolled under a rolling pin or crushed in a mortar and pestle. The smaller the grains the greater the reactive surface area.

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The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin serves as a solemn reminder of the millions of lives lost during the Holocaust. It also serves as the backdrop for hundreds of gay and bisexual men using the austere grey concrete backdrop as a location to shoot their profile pictures for social app Grindr. The images have been collected on the blog ‘Totem and Taboo: Grindr Remembers the Holocaust,’ and have caused considerable outrage over the political correctness of the location.

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The photo that started it all, which was posted Wednesday, showed the forlorn animal in a closed-off area wet with rain, looking bleakly through the fence. “This guy was signed over to [Jackson Rabies Control], not [because] he’s mean or [because] he tears things up, but because … [h]is owner says he’s gay!” the caption under the photo explained. “He hunched [sic] another male dog so his owner threw him away [because] he refuses to have a ‘gay’ dog! Even if that weren’t the most assinine [sic] thing I’ve ever heard, it’s still discrimination!” The post additionally threatened that the dog would lose his life today if he weren’t adopted, due to a lack of room at the facility.

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A federal grand jury in the Central District of California has turned in a 30-count indictment against 27-year-old hacker Karen “Gary” Kazaryan, a resident from Glendale, Calif. If convicted on all 30 counts, including 15 counts of computer intrusion and 15 counts of aggravated identity theft, Kazaryan could face up to 105 years in federal prison. Karen ‘Gary’ Kazaryan: The Hacker Who Allegedly Blackmailed 350 Women With 3,000 Nude Photos Over Skype And Facebook According to the indictment released early Wednesday morning, Kazaryan allegedly hacked his way into hundreds of online accounts, using personal information and nude or semi-nude photos of his victims to coerce more than 350 female victims to show him their naked bodies, usually over Skype. By posing as a friend, Kazaryan allegedly tricked these women into stripping for him on camera, allegedly capturing more than 3,000 images of these women to blackmail them.

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The footage shows the alleged victim telling Rabbi Padwa about someone “who sexually abused me when I was younger, when I was a child and I’m looking for your advice, to be honest, what to do…Would do you think maybe, is it a good idea to speak to the police about it?”. “Oh no,” Padwa answers, explaining that doing so would breach Rabbinic Law. The alleged victim says that child sex abuse is a “very serious issue”, but is told not tell the police. Rabbi Padwa adds: “Men Tur Nisht,” which is Yiddish for “people must not tell tales.” He continues: “The police is not the solution.”

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According to reports, all personal information stored on major cloud computing services can be spied on by US agencies without users’ knowledge or even a search warrant. This is all reportedly being done under the recently reauthorized Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and has led British Members of Parliament to call on the British government to not only end the use of cloud computing but also stop sharing intelligence services with the U.S, according to the Independent. It’s worth pointing out that the US government has admitted breaching the Fourth Amendment under FISA while maintaining an absurd level of secrecy around the Act. Given the massive expansion of the Pentagon’s cyberwarfare forces and the exponential rise in surveillance overall, people around the world have a quite legitimate reason to be concerned.

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Burger King has revealed that some of its burgers were contaminated in the horsemeat scare, as the tainted food crisis threatened to undermine the confidence of consumers, and major retailers tried to protect their reputations.

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Look, I’m as sentimental as the next person. (I cried for the entirety of Les Miserables.) I love my cat and she gives my life meaning. But I also can admit that the science is staring us in the face. We can’t bear to talk about euthanizing cats because they are so friggin’ cute–but, if we’re honest with ourselves, the best solution to this problem is to kill cats. Kill them, with their cute little faces, their soft fur and their snuggles. Some of the cats need to be dead.

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A Catholic priest busted for allegedly dealing crystal meth was suspended after church officials discovered he was a cross-dresser who was having sex in the rectory at Bridgeport’s St. Augustine Cathedral. Monsignor Kevin Wallin was relieved of his duties in May, but the Roman Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport continued to pay him a stipend until his Jan. 3 arrest — a day he was planning to fly to London on vacation. Now dubbed “Msgr. Meth” by some, Wallin seemed to live a life that easily could have been ripped from the script of “Breaking Bad,” the popular AMC series about a high school chemistry teacher turned crystal methamphetamine producer. At one point, Wallin was selling upwards of $9,000 of meth a week, according to his indictment. In his post-priesthood, Wallin, 61, bought an adult specialty and video store in North Haven, Conn., called Land of Oz that sells sex toys and X-rated DVDs. Investigators believe the shop helped him launder thousands of dollars in weekly profits.

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The ruling last October came in a motion to suppress the evidence obtained by the warrantless video cameras. After that ruling, the defendants, five members of the Magana family, pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute marijuana and now face up to life in prison and up to $10 million in fines. But as part of the plea deal, they retained their right to appeal the ruling. And their attorneys say they are prepared to take the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. In their motion, they had asked the court to suppress evidence because of the property’s locked gate and “No Trespassing” sign. Since the properties were heavily wooded and posted with signs, the owners were entitled to an expectation of privacy, the attorneys say.

K-9s are trained to detect marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. They are not trained to detect mushrooms or LSD.

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Case in point: In October 1969, LIFE ran a cover story (or rather, a series of stories) under the banner: MARIJUANA: At Least 12 Million American Have Now Tried It. Are penalties too severe? Should it be legalized? Across 10 full pages, intermingling opinion, photography and reportage, LIFE took a hard look at pot smoking in the U.S., but waded deep into the debate — already heated then — of whether or not the country’s draconian marijuana statutes were doing more harm than good.

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This TV ad promoting Verizon’s Droid DNA phone is weird, cringe-worthy and also promotes something else: Transhumanism. Indeed, the ad does not only sell a smartphone. Not unlike movies and music videos, it normalizes the concept of “upgrading” humans by merging them with machines. While most of us already entertain a somewhat unhealthy, dependent relationship with our cellphones, this ad makes things creepier by showing the device completely modifying the user’s body and genetic makeup. Yes, it is “only a commercial”, but all of the concepts behind it are real and will be available to a very rich and limited public very soon. Here’s the ad.

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The Drug Enforcement Administration is trying to access private prescription records of patients in Oregon without a warrant, despite a state law forbidding it from doing so. The ACLU and its Oregon affiliate are challenging this practice in a new case that raises the question of whether the Fourth Amendment allows federal law enforcement agents to obtain confidential prescription records without a judge’s prior approval. It should not.

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It is one of the most controversial Hollywood productions in years. And new stills of controversial new made-for-TV film Phil Spector show Al Pacino, who plays the music mogul, being sent to prison for murdering a B movie actress Lana Clarkson. The Godfather star wears a massive afro wig in the courtroom scene, and is flanked by Dame Helen Mirren, who is playing his lawyer Linda Kenny Baden.

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Taboos are not relics of ancient societies. America has its share of views that are cemented in cultural mores. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a 1996 Supreme Court dissent, “Closed-minded we were — as every age is, including our own, with regard to matters it cannot guess, because it simply does not consider them debatable.” By foreclosing debate, modern taboos surrounding topics such as excrement, sex, drugs and death lead to harmful attitudes and policies. The ensuing misery ranges from “slut shaming” to the tragedy of the drug war that has resulted in over 50,000 violent Mexican deaths since 2006. Taboos negatively affect the latent assumptions on which Americans carry out their lives, and have transformed the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness into the pursuit of health, safety and the avoidance of death.

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Doctors in China are experimenting with an extreme treatment for addiction. The experimental procedure consists of destroying portions of the brain’s pleasure center in an attempt to stop cravings for opiate drugs like heroin. Possible side effects including permanently disabling an addict’s ability to experience the entire range of human emotions, including the capacity to feel joy.

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Argus Panoptes is the name of a giant of Greek mythology who had a hundred eyes and who was said to be “all-seeing”. What an appropriate name for DARPA’s latest wide area monitoring system, described as the “next generation of surveillance”. When mounted on a drone, ARGUS (which stands for Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System) has a 1.8 Gigapixels video system that allows the constant video surveillance of a small city, complete with the tracking of moving objects and incredible zoom-in capabilities. Here’s a short video describing the basic (and non top-secret) capabilities of this technology. As you’ll see, the guy in the documentary refuses to say where this system is used. One thing, it is used and most probably on civilians. The All-Seeing Eye is not just a symbol, it is a goal the powers that be are striving to achieve.

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I downloaded Zero Dark Thirty off BitTorrent because I thought I’d review the film exclusively for Media Underground. I’m not going to pay one dime for a Lockheed Martin commercial and I knew how it ends so here’s my take. The film should be called Zero Fuck Movie. It begins with a retarded looking ginger anorexic pale Carrot Juice Maya bitch standing in the background during a torture scene, but you’re supposed to feel sorry for her because she can’t stand to watch torture. First thoughts: any CIA agent in that room is going to be a West Point graduate and a professional sadist and is not going to give a fuck about torture. When they keep cutting back to her with that Florence Nightingale compassion cunt-face, it’s utterly laughable.

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The Tower of David, called after David brillembourg, the tower’s investor died in 1993. The building is incomplete due to the crisis of 1994 lacking of elevators, installed electricity, running water, balcony railing, windows, and even walls in many places. As Virginia Lopez, The Guardian, reported, Tower of David is far from the perfect home. No sewage system is in place, lorry-delivered water is rationed, whole sections of the building are in the dark and the absence of lifts forces people to walk up hundreds of stairs.

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Hawaiian surfer Garrett McNamara successfully rode a towering wave believed to be over 30 meters tall (100 feet) off the coast of Nazaré in Portugal on Monday. Reportedly, he’s now broken his own world record, set in 2011 in the same spot. The waves in this part of the Atlantic Ocean are legendary among surfers.

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No personality in the history of science has been pushed further into the realm of mythology than the Serbian-American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. He is, without a doubt, one of the true giants in the history of electromagnetic theory. As an inventor he was as prolific as they come, with approximately 300 patents having been discovered in at least 26 countries, but many more inventions as well that stayed within his lab and were never patented. As remarkable as were his talents was his personality: private, eccentric, possessed of extraordinary memory and bizarre habits, and with a headlong descent into mental illness during his later years. Tesla’s unparalleled combination of genius and aberrance have turned him into one of the seminal cult figures of the day. As such, at least as much fiction as fact have swirled around popular accounts of his life, and devotees of conspiracy theories and alternative science hypotheses have hijacked his name more than that of any other figur…

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Staff turned off the video camera typically used to record medical procedures. They strapped Coleman down at “four points” with seatbelt-like “therapeutic” restraints. Edward Blanchette, the internist and prison medical director at the time, pushed a thick, flexible tube up Coleman’s right nostril. Rubber scraped against cartilage and bone and drew blood. Coleman howled. As the tube snaked into his throat, it kinked, bringing the force of insertion onto the sharp edges of the bent tube. They thought he was resisting so they secured a wide mesh strap over his shoulders to keep him from moving. A nurse held his head. Blanchette finally realized that the tube had kinked and pulled it back out. He pushed a second tube up Coleman’s nose, down his throat, and into his stomach. Blanchette filled the tube with vanilla Ensure. Coleman’s nose bled. He gagged constantly against the tube. He puked. As they led him back to his cell, the cuffs of Coleman’s gray sweatshirt were soaked with snot, s…

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In a report that scaled up local surveys and pilot studies to national dimensions, scientists from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that domestic cats in the United States — both the pet Fluffies that spend part of the day outdoors and the unnamed strays and ferals that never leave it — kill a median of 2.4 billion birds and 12.3 billion mammals a year, most of them native mammals like shrews, chipmunks and voles rather than introduced pests like the Norway rat. The estimated kill rates are two to four times higher than mortality figures previously bandied about, and position the domestic cat as one of the single greatest human-linked threats to wildlife in the nation. More birds and mammals die at the mouths of cats, the report said, than from automobile strikes, pesticides and poisons, collisions with skyscrapers and windmills and other so-called anthropogenic causes.

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OMG! Thanks Jasmine

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A controversial theory that the way we smell involves a quantum physics effect has received a boost, following experiments with human subjects. It challenges the notion that our sense of smell depends only on the shapes of molecules we sniff in the air. Instead, it suggests that the molecules’ vibrations are responsible. A way to test it is with two molecules of the same shape, but with different vibrations. A report in PLOS ONE shows that humans can distinguish the two. Tantalisingly, the idea hints at quantum effects occurring in biological systems – an idea that is itself driving a new field of science

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The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is using an anti-terrorism device that indiscriminately sweeps up cellphone communications of innocent bystanders during burglary, drug and murder investigations. LA Weekly wrote back in September that the police agency purchased Stingray technology in 2006 using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds, and is deploying the portable equipment for routine police operations. DHS grant documents said the device was intended for “regional terrorism investigations.” Stingray pretends that it is a cell tower and fools wireless phones into establishing a connection. Once connected, it can establish cell location and download information of people who are not suspects in an investigation, raising all sorts of privacy issues.

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People with damage to a specific part of the brain entrusted unexpectedly large amounts of money to complete strangers. In an investment game played in the lab, three women with damage to a small part of the brain called the basolateral amygdala handed over nearly twice as much money as healthy people.

Contrary to media presentations, it appears Eugene did not take bath salts, LSD, or cocaine. According to his girlfriend he frequently used marijuana but refused all other drugs. He even avoided medication for minor ailments like headaches. Two days before the attack Eugene and two friends had a Bible study where they discussed how to become better men according to the word of God. Eugene vowed to give up marijuana. It is more likely that this vow – not bath salts – precipitated the attack.

The young people’s meetings I went to all over Los Angeles featured a revolving cast of men that I would call perverts. They weren’t the obvious kind of creeps, either, with windowless white vans and long trench coats. They looked like everyone else at the meetings: tattooed and cool and smoking cigarettes. These men swarmed me, as they did every other newcomer too young and inexperienced to distinguish between the loving hand of AA and the clammy hand of a predator. They welcomed me to the meetings, they gave me over-long hugs, they offered me smokes when I was still too young to buy my own. I felt absolutely enveloped by the program. I had never had so many people pay attention to me in my life. But what I thought of as harmless flirting—and all flirting is harmless when you’re 17 and your curfew is 10 pm—these men rightly interpreted as vulnerability.

Another popular technique can be seen in an image of a “eight-legged” bison at Chauvet cave, which is actually two superimposed images in slightly different stances. Azéma and Rivère say they have found 53 figures in twelve different caves that use this technique to represent animals running, tossing their heads, or shaking their tails. An even more impressive example is the use of stone or bone disks with engravings of a sitting and standing animal on opposite sides, which may have served as a prehistoric version of the 19th century toy known as a thaumatrope. If a strand of animal tendon run through a hole in the center of the disk was twisted and then rapidly untwisted, it would make the disk spin so fast that the two images would merge into an animation of the animal changing position.

When people ask Hamilton Morris what he does, he tells them he works in science. “I don’t have any desire to explain myself,” he says. Which is a shame, because if he did, they’d get a much more outlandish answer. Morris is a 24-year-old psychonaut – that is to say, an explorer in the realm of psychoactive substances. Another way of putting this is that he takes drugs for a living. Resembling an even-more-attenuated member of the Horrors and talking in a distinctive, deep bass voice with long, drawled vowels that themselves sound narcotised, Morris travels the world in search of new highs. These adventures, which he undertakes with a mix of gonzo abandon and scholarly rigour, are chronicled in the vice.com video series Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia.

A DOZY drug dealer was caught out after taking pictures of himself wearing a crown made of £20 notes with a bag of drugs hanging from his mouth. Other images found on Ayub Hagos’ mobile phone included piles of cash, guns, knives and white powder. The 19-year-old was arrested after police found heroin and crack cocaine in the flat he was staying at in Oxford Road, Southsea. He denied having anything to do with the drugs but when police found the photographs on his phone Hagos realised the game was up and changed his plea. He was jailed for three-and-a-half years at Portsmouth Crown Court. His barrister Alexander Thompson said Hagos had been naive. ‘He took the photographs as bravado to make himself seem more important in front of his peers,’ he said. ‘It’s incredibly naive for a sophisticated drug dealer to have these sort of photographs on his phone.’

Matt, who last Sunday revealed to The Sun Jacko’s romance with fellow superstar Whitney Houston, told how the King of Pop hated his skin colour so much he almost BURNED off his willy with bleaching creams. And the chart-topper desperately tried to BED Pamela Anderson months before his death — after becoming obsessed with her fake breasts and plastic surgery. Matt revealed that Jacko: DESPISED Madonna so much he named one of his deadly pet snakes after her. POKED holes in a voodoo doll he made of Steven Spielberg after the singer became a Nazi sympathiser. FLEW into a rage when he was barred from buying the Speaker’s chair from the House of Commons to use as his “green throne”. HID a huge stash of porn.

In this small Mexican town that sends sex slaves to New York, little boys dream of growing up to be pimps. Gaudy gabled houses that rise above gated walls are proof of the profits to be made from funneling “delivery girls” to Roosevelt Ave. in Queens. An annual parade of pimps in plumed hats — wielding whips to settle business beefs — is evidence that cash and fear has conquered shame here. “Many kids aspire to be traffickers,” said Emilio Munoz Berruecos, who grew up in the next village and runs a local human rights center. “This is a phenomenon that goes back half a century.” The town of 10,000, about 80 miles from Mexico City, is Mexico’s undisputed cradle of sex trafficking, one end of a pipeline that leads directly to our city’s streets. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s New York field office arrested 32 sex traffickers last year; 26 of them were from Tenancingo.

City animal control officers were called to Winecoff’s home Sunday evening after the monkey escaped and bit three people in the nearby neighborhood before returning home, Welch said. Officers obtained a search warrant when no one answered the door and went inside, finding the monkey and noticing drug paraphernalia in the home, Welch said. Winecoff returned home as officers were searching the house. Obtaining a second search warrant to look for drugs, officers then discovered about 3 pounds of marijuana along with hashish, mushrooms and Ecstasy, Welch said.

It’s a tiny fraction of the 131,483 people who have received medical marijuana cards since Michigan’s voter-approved program started in 2009, according to a state website. The program is run by the Bureau of Health Professions in the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. Of the 44 minors with cards, 21 are 17 years old, 11 are 16 and five are 15. A 7-year-old and two 9-year-olds also have received the cards, the Detroit Free Press ( ) reported Sunday. Two others are 14 years old, and a 13-year-old and 11-year-old also hold the cards.

The same anesthetic that caused the overdose death of pop star Michael Jackson is now the drug of choice for executions in Missouri, causing a stir among critics who question how the state can guarantee a drug untested for lethal injection won’t cause pain and suffering for the condemned.

It is alleged a fight broke out between the two men after Mr Purvis approached his neighbour on behalf of everyone in the apartment block to ask him to stop vacuuming in the early hours of the morning. “He came out and he got me by my trousers and my jacket there, and he tipped me over onto my pot plant down there,” Mr Purvis told A Current Affair. Mr Purvis said the pot plant saved his life by breaking his fall.

However the teenager soon became hooked on tanning and has since spent $52,505 (£23,000) on salon treatments and fake tan products. But the blonde, who now lives in New Jersey, refuses to stop using sunbeds and relies on modelling work to fund her addiction. She said: ‘It’s definitely been worth spending all that money. I’m in the modelling industry so I have to look good all the time. ‘Some people spend way more than that on cigarettes, so I just look at tanning as my guilty pleasure. Mum did the right thing, she wanted me to be happy.’

April 18 to May 6, in a room in the old county seat of Huidong in Guangdong province, this reporter used 19 days to witness the last part of drug addict Wu Guilin’s life.

If, however, you’re concerned about things such as freedom, control and innovation, then the prospect of a world in which most people access the internet via smartphones and other cloud devices is a troubling one. Why? Because smartphones (and tablets) are tightly controlled, “tethered” appliances. You may think that you own your shiny new iPhone or iPad, for example. But in fact an invisible chain stretches from it all the way back to Apple’s corporate HQ in California. Nothing, but nothing, goes on your iDevice that hasn’t been approved by Apple. And even if you’re not an Apple fanboy and sport an Android-powered mobile device, there is still the problem that your access to the internet is regulated by a company – your mobile network provider – which is free not just to charge prohibitively for access but also to decide what you can access and what you can’t.

When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to companies like Google, AT&T; and Facebook. But what happens when the government demands that these companies to hand over your private information? Will the company stand with you? Will it tell you that the government is looking for your data so that you can take steps to protect yourself?

The war on drugs has a new front, and so far it appears to be a losing one. Synthetic mimics of marijuana, dissociative drugs and stimulants — such as the “bath salts” allegedly consumed by Randy Eugene, the Florida man shot after a horrific face-eating assault — are growing in popularity and hard to control. Every time a compound is banned, overseas chemists synthesize a new version tweaked just enough to evade a law’s letter. It’s a giant game of chemical Whack-a-Mole. “Manufacturers turn these things around so quickly. One week you’ll have a product with compound X, the next week it’s compound Y,” said forensic toxicologist Kevin Shanks of AIT Laboratories, an Indiana-based chemical testing company. “It’s fascinating how fast it can occur, and it’s fascinating to see the minute changes in chemical structure they’ll come up with. It’s similar, but it’s different,” Shanks continued. During the last several years, the market for legal highs has exploded in North America and Europe

Some area law enforcement officials apparently know who is installing the mysterious camera boxes on utility poles around St. Lawrence County, but they’re not saying who it is. The boxes, with a window for cameras to peer out of, have popped up in Norwood, Raymondville, DeKalb Junction, Waddington, Massena and Canton, according to witnesses. Law enforcement officials at local, state and federal agencies agree the boxes contain license plate readers that take snapshots, and are not video cameras that send live feeds. But none of them are willing to identify what agency the cameras belong to and who is operating them.

That New Mexico managed to find $22 million to subsidize a major motion picture should raise some eyebrows, considering that, in the last few years, it has cut funding for services for the elderly and the disabled, preschool, higher education, and its state workforce. “We could have spent that $22 million on all kinds of things, like education for our children. We could have spent it on roads,” said New Mexico state Rep. Dennis Kintigh (R). New Mexico is far from the only state providing subsidies for film and television production. In 2010, 43 states spent $1.5 billion on film and TV subsidies. Of the nine films that were nominated for best picture in 2012, five received state subsidies, including The Help, Moneyball and The Descendents.

The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich “consuming” countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn “producing” nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems. The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

Television networks are having a busy month trying to stamp out new TV-watching technology, including telling a court that skipping a commercial while watching a recorded show is illegal. Yesterday, Fox, NBC, and CBS all sued Dish Network over its digital video recorder with automatic commercial-skipping. The same networks, plus ABC, Univision, and PBS, are gearing up for a May 30 hearing in their cases against Aereo, a New York startup bringing local broadcast TV to the Internet. EFF and Public Knowledge filed an amicus brief supporting Aereo this week.

Police executed a search warrant on Wednesday morning after a call from the Kinyua family in which the brother said he found two metal tins containing a head and two hands in the laundry room of the house. During their search, police reportedly retrieved the head and hands. They also found more body parts inside a dumpster a few blocks away. When they interviewed the suspect, police said Kinyua admitted to cutting up the victim with a knife and cannibalizing the heart and portions of the brain. Although the body parts had yet to be identified by the chief medical examiner, authorities believe they belong to Agyei-Kodie, said sheriff’s spokeswoman Monica Worrell.

After the first no-hitter in New York Mets history, SNY caught a special glimpse of the team in the locker room afterward. Ironically, this is during an interview with a player named R.A. Dickey.

A man who filmed himself chopping up his lover before posting body parts to politicians was being hunted across Europe last night. Luka Magnotta, who is suspected of cannibalism, flew from Canada to France a day after placing gruesome footage of the murder on the internet. Police fear the gay porn star may now have slipped into Britain. Six months ago, he was living in a £40-a-night room above the Fusilier Inn in Wembley, North London, while sightseeing in the capital.

By now almost everyone knows (I hope!) that LA has a subway system. But did you know that this is not the first subway that LA has ever had?

Seriously, is there anything that says “we have zombies” more than the CDC denying we have zombies? The web chatter started in earnest last weekend, when a gruesome story out of Florida went viral, in which an apparently psychotic man attacked another, chewing the second’s face for nearly twenty minutes before police were forced to fire off a full clip at the assailant, eventually killing him. (It was reported that the attacker carried on chewing his victim’s flesh after having been shot, which is a behavior many associate with zombie tropes on TV and in film.) But it wasn’t just the Florida face-chewing incident that got web searchers buzzing. Another incident involved a doctor who began spitting blood at arresting officers during a traffic stop and was difficult to subdue afterwards at the hospital, and a few incidents in which hazmat teams were dispatched to schools after reports of unexplainable rashes popping up among large numbers of students.

“[Please retweet] I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen …Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” Just days after Sugiyama’s 22nd birthday, the artist underwent elective genital-removal surgery, divvied up the severed penis shaft, testicles, and scrotal skin between five people, and garnished it with button mushrooms and Italian parsley. On April 13, five of six diners who signed up for the $250-a-plate feast, sat down to dinner. The sixth person was a no-show.

Media outlets are reporting that Rudy Eugene, a.k.a. the “Miami Zombie,” who chewed a man’s face off (and even ate his eyeballs) did so because he was “overdosing” on bath salts, “a new potent form of LSD,” and maybe also cocaine. These reports are based entirely on speculation by police spokesmen and media excited to fan the flames of fear in Miami. No toxicology tests were performed, no drug paraphernalia found on the scene. Bath salts are not “the new LSD,” and calling them the new LSD is propaganda for the media to gobble up. Bath salts and LSD have almost nothing in common chemically, and there is no hard evidence (outside of one police spokesman’s speculation) that Rudy Eugene was high on anything. Not only are his statements not supported by science, they are at odds with common sense. But the media love a good drug scare story, so they’re repeating the statements of one Miami cop, Armando Aguilar.

New findings from the Monell Center reveal that humans can identify the age of other humans based on differences in body odor. Much of this ability is based on the capacity to identify odors of elderly individuals, and contrary to popular supposition, the so-called ‘old-person smell’ is rated as less intense and less unpleasant than body odors of middle-aged and young individuals.

A loose coalition of eco-anarchist groups is increasingly launching violent attacks on scientists. A group calling itself the Olga Cell of the Informal Anarchist Federation International Revolutionary Front has claimed responsibility for the non-fatal shooting of a nuclear-engineering executive on 7 May in Genoa, Italy. The same group sent a letter bomb to a Swiss pro-nuclear lobby group in 2011; attempted to bomb IBM’s nanotechnology laboratory in Switzerland in 2010; and has ties with a group responsible for at least four bomb attacks on nanotechnology facilities in Mexico. Security authorities say that such eco-anarchist groups are forging stronger links.

Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, is being reintroduced into DC Comics in a big way: as the main superhero of the parallel-world Earth 2, and as a gay man.

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009. Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread. Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010. Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors. A new study just published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology tracked the chemical composition of legal highs as the bans were introduced.

A Catholic priest has claimed a missing schoolgirl was kidnapped for Vatican sex parties and has implicated diplomatic staff and members of the Holy See. Italian priest Gabriel Amorth, 85, said girls were recruited for parties at the Vatican and said the death of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, last seen alive in 1983, “was a crime with a sexual motive”. The priest spoke out last week as investigators broke into the grave of a known gang boss in Rome following an anonymous tip that the key to Emanuala’s disappearance would be “found there”. But so far bones which do not belong to mobster Enrico De Pedis, have not be positively identified as the girl’s. In an interview with La Stampa newspaper, Father Amorth said: “It has already previously been stated by (deceased) monsignor Simeone Duca, an archivist at the Vatican, who was asked to recruit girls for parties with the help of the Vatican gendarmes.

Obesity is a widespread epidemic, even among the homeless. While the popularized image of a homeless individual is one of skin and bones, a new study shows the reality is not so. One in three (32.3%) homeless individuals in the United States is obese, highlighting a hunger-obesity paradox. The paradox is that hunger and obesity can exist in the same person. And although a person may be overweight or obese, he or she can lack proper nutrition. Nutrition is a daily challenge for homeless people, as the foods they manage to get are often full of preservatives and high in sodium, fats and sugars. They may not have access to healthier options like fresh fruits and vegetables.

If you are thinking about tweeting about clouds, pork, exercise or even Mexico, think again. Doing so may result in a closer look by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In a story appearing earlier today on the U.K’s Daily Mail website, it was reported that the DHS has been forced to release a list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor various social networking sites. The list provides a glimpse into what DHS describes as “signs of terrorist or other threats against the U.S.” The list was posted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center who filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, before suing to obtain the release of the documents. The documents were part of the department’s 2011 ’Analyst’s Desktop Binder‘ used by workers at their National Operations Center which instructs workers to identify ‘media reports that reflect adversely on DHS and response activities’.

Germany fed a whopping 22 gigawatts of solar power per hour into the national grid last weekend, setting a new record by meeting nearly half of the country’s weekend power demand. After the Fukushima disaster, Japan opted to shut down all of its nuclear power stations and Germany followed suit after considerable public pressure. This seems to have paved the way for greater investment in solar energy projects. The Renewable Energy Industry (IWR) in Muenster announced that Saturday’s solar energy generation met nearly 50 percent of the nation’s midday electricity needs AND was equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity!

We’ve seen snake robots and, of course, tons of surgery robots (including the weird lamprey-bot), but Dr. Michael Argenziano, the Chief of Adult Cardiac Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center in New York, says we’ll soon have fully untethered snake-type robots that will crawl through the human body, assisting with all kinds of fixes and maintenance.

State prison inmates are just as likely to have sexual contact with prison staff as they are with other prisoners, according to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report. The report found that about 5.3 percent of former state prisoners reported sexual encounters of some kind involving facility staff. Of those, 1.2 percent reported that staff had forced them into the sex acts.

Food conspiracy theories are pretty interesting. The famous Church’s Fried Chicken chain has one associated it, and it originated in the mid-’80s. At the time, it was believed that the company was owned by White supremacist gang the Klu Klux Klan (KKK), who have always had a vendetta against African Americans. Since it is no secret that the KKK hates Black people, it was allegedly thought that these haters tainted their chicken recipe with an ingredient that would render all Black men sterile.

A Philadelphia cop was arrested over allegations that he abducted a 14-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her and made her watch him have sex with a prostitute. Police found Anthony Dattilo, 36, at a motel in the Bensalem area of the city Wednesday while responding to a possible abduction, according to the Bucks County Courier Times. Dattilo, a 12-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department, is reportedly in custody at the Bucks County prison on $500,000 bail.

A high school art teacher in Tucson is accused of having sex with four of her students. KVOA reports that Melissa Dalton was initially booked on four counts of sexual conduct with a minor on April 30. After she posted bail and was released, more students came forward with details about the 33-year-old wife and mother’s other alleged sexual encounters. That prompted police to add eight more counts, including six of sex with a minor. Police started the investigation after one of the alleged victims told his cousin he had sex with Dalton. According to KVOA, one student claimed Dalton sent him explicit text messages containing photos of her posing in front of a bathroom mirror. Dalton’s cell phone was confiscated by police, along with the phones of the students involved.

Additional testing has confirmed beach rocks that spontaneously combusted in a Southern California woman’s pocket contained elevated levels of phosphorus, an official said Friday. The source of the substance is still unclear, but an expert says it probably was manmade. Results from an independent lab matched those obtained by the Orange County Public Health Care Agency, which examined the rocks immediately after the May 12 incident, agency spokeswoman Deanne Thompson said. Lyn Hiner, 43, suffered second- and third-degree burns on her right leg from her thigh to her knee and on her right arm when the rocks set her shorts on fire several hours after her children collected them on a San Clemente beach. Hiner couldn’t extinguish the flames, and her husband suffered second-degree burns when he tried to help her.

One of the fastest ways to ruin the Internet would be to put the United Nations in charge of it. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the United Nations wants. The United Nations is now pushing very hard for complete control over the Internet. A proposal that has the support of China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and Iran would give control of the Internet to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union.

The white haze that hangs over many major cities could become a familiar sight everywhere if the world decides to try geoengineering to create a cooler planet. Scientists have long suspected that one oft-discussed geoengineering technique — shooting tiny sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight — could turn the blue sky white. Nature has already provided a basic proof of concept. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, spewing tons of sulfate particles in the atmosphere, it temporarily whitened the sky. Now a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science attempts to determine just how big the effect from man-made geoengineering would be. Adding enough sulfate to the stratosphere to block 2 percent of the sun’s light would make the sky three to five times brighter

Jintu Gogoi’s neighbourhood in Sadiya, Upper Assam, is no longer friendly. Over two weeks ago, an army of eight-legged freaks invaded it. It all happened in the evening on May 8. Most of the inhabitants of Chaulkhowa Nagaon village had been to a Bihu function. When the programme drew to a close, swarms of spiders suddenly descended from nowhere and started biting the people. The festive mood soon turned into one of panic with people bumping into each other and tripping over empty benches in their frantic bid to egress. Jintu was bitten by one of these critters.

They were written to teach children colours and strange words but distorted versions of bouncy Sesame Street songs have been used to torture Guantanamo Bay prisons for days, it has been claimed. The staggering assertion has been made in a documentary from Al Jazeera and follows previous claims in 2008 that heavier tunes such as Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ and Drowning Pool’s ‘Bodies’ were played incessantly to prisoners at the naval base in Cuba. According to the report ‘innocent children’s songs were abused for inhumane purposes’ as music from the popular US children programme was blasted repeatedly into prisoners’ ears.

Witnesses say two men in the Brightmoor neighborhood were so passionate about the way they make Kool-Aid, they started arguing with each other over who does it better. Sadly, that fight took a horrifying turn when they both pulled out guns and started firing at each other. Again, this was over Kool-Aid. They didn’t hit each other, but two innocent bystanders suffered gunshot wounds in the soft drink shooting. Police call it utterly ridiculous, but they’ve seen worse.

This helpful hygiene education pamphlet promotes a 1950’s and 60’s line of training bras for young girls interested in growing boobies. Their sage wisdom includes: Thinnies should go heavy on cheese, bread, butter, milk. Plumpies should favor salads, lean meat, non-fat milk. Wear a bra to increase self-confidence, even if you have no breasts. Your mother will understand. Swimming, Tennis and stretching are all super for your bust line. Looking good mostly means walking with your head up, shoulders back, chest up, and stomach in. Doctors agree that the delicate glands and tissues of the developing breasts need proper support. If you’re shy or uncomfortable, just pretend you’re not. Be sure to check out the “Littlest Angel” bra with patented nylon “Gro-Cup” that expands in the event of boob sproutage. Also available: “Dainti-Teen Sanitary panty-belt.” Sorry ladies, white only.

Hop on Tumblr for a few minutes, and at least 50% of what you’ll see will be one of the following: cats, and girls in slutty poses wearing metal shirts. While I totally support girls taking slutty pics of themselves and putting them on the internet, I have to make sure we all understand what’s really happening. Brahs, don’t be fooled: GIRLS DON’T ACTUALLY LIKE METAL!

Half of Americans think Facebook is a passing fad, according to the results of a new Associated Press-CNBC poll. And, in the run-up to the social network’s initial public offering of stock, half of Americans also say the social network’s expected asking price is too high.

In an extraordinary gathering of nearly 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, leading rabbis of the yeshiva and Hassidic world all but banned the Internet. A halachic decision rendered by Rabbi Shmuel Halevi Wosner, one of the senior rabbis in the Orthodox world, said the Internet could be used for work purposes in an office — but only if absolutely necessary, and with the use of a filter. There was no justification for Internet use at home under any circumstances.

Unless you have the time or the technical know-how to encrypt your digital communications, none of what you transmit – however personal — through a digital wireline or wireless network is “private.” Rather, through the spectacle of post-modern capitalism, the private has become public, the property of the corporation that owns your keystrokes. The digital revolution has morphed the personal into an electronic commodity; the electronic commodity is the exchange currency of an encroaching, 21st-century digital feudalism.

NSFW!

Awesome retro knee socks ‘n mary janes in mud puddles

Photos of the item, which was titled “10 Pack Trayvon Martin Targets,” showed crosshairs over a hoodie similar to the one Trayvon Martin was wearing when he was shot by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in February. The figure has a bag of Skittle in his pocket and is holding what appears to be a can of iced tea, similar to what Martin had purchased before being gunned down. The pack of 10 targets was being sold for $8.

Mike Apatow, of Milford, poses at Stratford Fire Station, Company 2, in Stratford, Conn. May 10th, 2012, where he works as firefighter. Apatow, who had a radioactive stress test Wednesday, was pulled over later in the day, in Newtown, by a state police trooper after a radioactivity detector in the trooper’s car was set off when Apatow passed. The detectors are used to help identify potential terror threats.

Q. What’s next for Anonymous? A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems.

Newsweek’s cover this week declares that Barack Obama is the “First Gay President,” playing on the reader’s knowledge that Obama isn’t himself gay, but his support for same-sex marriage earns him an honorary rainbow halo. The headline obviously calls back to 1998, when Toni Morrison declared Bill Clinton the first black president in The New Yorker, which at the time was edited by current Newsweek editor Tina Brown. “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas,” Morrison wrote, laying out the formula for how to declare a President has attained the identity of someone else through actions and behaviors. Newsweek’s cover has been called “controversial” and “pretty shocking,” but it’s merely the most recent in presidential firsts that weren’t for the country’s actual first black president.

General Motors Co. plans to stop advertising with Facebook Inc. after deciding that paid ads on the site have little impact on consumers’ car purchases, according to a GM official. The move by GM, one of the largest advertisers in the U.S., puts a spotlight on an issue that many marketers have been raising: whether ads on Facebook help them sell more products. On Friday, Facebook is expected to sell shares in an initial public offering that could put a market value on the company of as much as $104 billion.

After footage surfaced of Occupy Wall Street protesters in Minnesota making claims that they’ve been drugged by police officers, authorities in the state have opened up a criminal investigation. At least one Minnesota state trooper has been placed on paid leave since law enforcement officers began investigating allegations that cops arrived at Occupy Wall Street encampments and drugged protesters. Independent filmmakers and journalists in the state say that they have encountered members of local Occupy offshoots who say they have been offered drugs by law enforcement officers. Protesters who opt in to the program are stoned for free while, in turn, cops monitor the effects of the intoxicants. Dan Feidt, an independent journalist who has investigated these claims, says there was nothing that complicated about the process: “The sheriff is getting people to do drugs and then they drop you back off at the plaza,” he tells RT.

The Obama administration could easily and justifiably move marijuana to, say, schedule III, which happens to be the same schedule that synthetic THC is in, making medical marijuana legal under federal law. There would be nothing unusual, extraordinary or legally suspect about Obama doing this. The executive branch has often moved certain drugs to lower or higher schedules based on new data without Congressional involvement. In fact, multiple sitting governors have petitioned the Obama administration asking him to move marijuana to a lower schedule, so he should be aware of the flexible authority he has. Obama is not some hapless victim whose actions on this issue are constrained by congressional law. The truth is pretty much the exact opposite. Under current law Obama effectively has the power to unilaterally make medical marijuana legal.

Unit 2 we now know completely liquified. We’ve never seen this before in the history of nuclear power. A 100% liquification of a uranium core.

Private emails, meeting transcripts and other key documents reveal that both the Obama White House and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission(NRC) were well aware of just how bad things really were with Fukushima from the early days of the disaster, but did nothing to warn the public about it. In fact, NRC and the White House purposely did not warn Americans about a massive radiation plume that struck the West Coast just days after the massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan’s eastern coast. According to information gathered from hundreds of pages worth of private NRC emails, conference calls and secret meetings, key players in the Fukushima whitewashing campaign, including the NRC’s David McIntyre and Elliot Brenner, were hard at work in the days following the disaster distracting public attention away from it. By pretending that a radioactive plume did not exist while simultaneously sending out misinformation to the media

LEFT your phone at home again? A solution is at hand: make sure it is with you at all times by having it implanted in your arm. But given the opportunity, would you want your gadget to be a permanent part of you? The question may need answering sooner than you think. Researchers at Autodesk, a software company in Toronto, Canada, checked to see whether the methods we currently use to interface with our gadgets work when the device is implanted in human tissue. The answer was a resounding “yes”. A button, an LED and a touch sensor all functioned appropriately when embedded under the skin of a cadaver’s arm. The team was even able to communicate transcutaneously using a Bluetooth connection and charge the electronics wirelessly. “That’s the bottom line,” says Christian Holz of the Autodesk team, who presented the work this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Austin, Texas. “Traditional user interfaces work through the skin.”

Piezoelectric devices promise to draw power from your footsteps or heartbeat, change the channel on your TV, and complete all sorts of helpful tasks — but they generally work in the nano-mechanical realm, requiring synthetic materials to function. Now for the first time, scientists have built a piezoelectric device using biological materials — in this case, viruses. Future sneakers may come with a customized viral mat on the bottom, with millions of would-be pathogens working together to power your mp3 player.

✪ The Crown Vic is dead; Long live the Crown Vic

In September, the last of the iconic cop cars — a veteran of countless street chases, both actual and theatrical — rolled off Ford’s production line in St. Thomas, Ontario. Hundreds of Crown Vics continue to serve and protect throughout Southern California, but it’s only a matter of miles before the law enforcement workhorse passes into cop legend. Like a cockroach, however, the Crown Vic is resilient. It’s already begun quietly colonizing civilian car culture, notably in Los Angeles County, where the number now in private hands — 38,000 — is second only to that in metropolitan New York, according to auto information company Edmunds.com.

A rogue cop from the DeKalb County Police Department in the state of Georgia is in the news for the third time in only seven months. Officer Jerad Wheeler is now being investigated after kicking a pregnant woman in the stomach. No charges have been filed against Officer Wheeler for kicking Raven Dozier in the abdomen after the cop responded to a call involving a child custody issue, reports local television station WSBTV News. Dozier says she was trying to calm her brother down during police questioning after a police officer used a Taser gun on her sibling. After her brother was shot, Ms. Dozier says she started crying and questioning the officer over his actions. That’s when Wheeler is reported to have gotten violent.

SICK web trolls stole a picture of a young girl with Down’s Syndrome and posted it on Facebook with a caption saying “lose your virginity to a retard”.

Is there a secret plan to evacuate some residents of Chicago in the event of major trouble during the NATO summit next month? CBS 2 has uncovered some evidence that there is. It comes from the Milwaukee area branch of the American Red Cross. CBS 2 News has obtained a copy of a Red Cross e-mail sent to volunteers in the Milwaukee area. It said the NATO summit “may create unrest or another national security incident. The American Red Cross in southeastern Wisconsin has been asked to place a number of shelters on standby in the event of evacuation of Chicago.”

Unfortunately, the sexuality of mentally disabled people has historically been ignored or denied (Carmody 1996). Prior to the last decade, most of this population was housed in large, sex-segregated institutions with few opportunities to socialize. Society in the past has tended to view mentally disabled people as asexual or, if they appear overly affectionate, hyper-sexual (Carmody 1996). However, personal relationships and sexuality are essential to the normal development of all adults, including those adults both with and without physical and/or mental disabilities (Smith 1995). While some mentally disabled individuals may not be able to participate in the most typical societal relationship – marriage with children – they can still participate in interpersonal relationships in meaningful ways. The healthy expression of sexuality need not require sexual intercourse, and can take a broad range of forms including close friendship, physical close-ness, and nongenital contact.

Another woman who attended Friday’s function said she watched on, “absolutely disgusted”, as children were given the chocolates. “My nine-year-old grandson gave this zip-lock bag to me, put it in my lap and said to me, ‘You’ve got a willy in there Nanny’,” she said. “Then I had a three-year-old sit down next to me and she said, ‘Hey, what’s this?’ She had this brown chocolate shaped like a penis and was about to eat the top off it.

Pub landlords will be banned from posting signs reading: “Come and watch the London Games from our big screen!” Fans in the crowd won’t be allowed to upload snippets of the day’s action to YouTube – or even, potentially, to post their snaps from inside the Olympic Village on Facebook. And a crack team of branding “police”, the Games organisers Locog have acknowledged, will be checking every bathroom in every Olympic venue – with the power to remove or tape over manufacturers’ logos even on soap dispensers, wash basins and toilets.

A COMMUNITY of dwarves have set up their very own theme park — with themselves as the star attraction — and these are the latest picture from inside it. comment on this story Residents of the Dwarf Empire must be under 4ft 3 ins tall, and they run their own police force and fire brigade from their 108 residents.

The discovery of a giant meat-eating dinosaur sporting a downy coat has some scientists reimagining the look of Tyrannosaurus rex. With a killer jaw and sharp claws, T. rex has long been depicted in movies and popular culture as having scaly skin. But the discovery of an earlier relative suggests the king of dinosaurs may have had a softer side. The evidence comes from the unearthing of a new tyrannosaur species in northeastern China that lived 60 million years before T. rex. The fossil record preserved remains of fluffy down, making it the largest feathered dinosaur ever found. If a T. rex relative had feathers, why not T. rex? Scientists said the evidence is trending in that direction. “People need to start changing their image of T. rex,” said Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not part of the discovery team.

THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.

A new gadget is designed to get people drunk INSTANTLY. The makers claim, however, that the ‘harm’ is limited, because you sober up equally rapidly. The alcohol is delivered via an aerosol spray, so people feel briefly drunk, then sober up. But however quickly people might recover, drunkenness can lead to accidents – and it’s also unclear how the device could be misused by alcoholics. Two American scientists designed the device – a small spray that gives you that instant drunk sensation from less than a drop of alcohol. The feeling lasts just seconds – but when it fades, you are sober and able to carry on with your day. The ‘Wahh Quantum Sensations’ delivers just a miniscule dose of alcohol – 0.075ml – directly in to your mouth, but thanks to the aerosol effect, the effect is instantaneous.

Following 9/11, news media accelerated at an amazing rate, and most companies adopted internet versions of their paper or magazines. Before this was commonplace, many interesting pieces of information from that day were most likely never reprinted again– due to false information or just abandonment by the person feeding the propaganda of a particular propagandistic ploy. ‘Part 1′ gives us a look at a ‘Terrorism Survival Guide,’ an actual print magazine which was distributed and sold at grocery stores around the country. We especially like the bio-terror section with the photoshoot of the little girl in a hazmat suit holding a Barbie with a gasmask on. We hope that they continue with this project, it’s fascinating to say the least, and possible they will uncover something most journalists and researchers have completely forgotten.

DETECTIVES are hunting a gang of men behind a string of vile street robberies across Sydney in which they threw faeces on their victims. It’s believed the offenders watch their victims withdraw large sums of cash from financial institutions before distracting them by hurling excrement on their backs. They then offer to help clean up their victims before robbing them.

Have you ever had the experience of stepping away from a novel and finding yourself thinking a little bit like the main character would? I’ve often described the feeling as being a little “book-drunk”, but I usually only experience it with really great novels. It seems to be worse when I read all or most of a book in one session. According to a story over at GalleyCat, scientists have completed a study that verifies that this experience is a common one, and that the actions of fictional characters can actually influence the decisions we make – whether we consciously realize it or not. They call the phenomena “experience-taking”, and it’s very real.

Secret closeup photos of his daughters and their friends playing in a backyard pool has landed a London father in jail for four months. The man, 44, was found guilty of the little-tested law of voyeurism in January. This week, Superior Court Justice Alan Bryant sentenced the man to four months in jail and two years of probation. It’s one of the few voyeurism cases to be tried since the law was enacted in 2005. The man’s photos were discovered in 2009 by one of his daughters when she was using his computer. The photos were of her and her friends — zoom shots of their clothed private areas. They were all in their early teens. London police found more than 6,000 photos focused on their chests, buttocks and genitals. They were filed under the initials of each girl’s name. Some of the photos were taken through the basement window where the man spent a lot of time on the computer. Police also found pictures of the man masturbating.

Tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, skunk oil, and how to deal with them.

A 28-year-old Peeping Tom’s voyeuristic tendencies proved to be a costly habit. So much so that he had to pay with his life. Ram Singh Verma, a resident of Bhashkarnagar, Kalwa in Thane, was allegedly in the habit of peeping through a little hole in the wall to watch his object of fantasy take her daily bath. The lady in question (name withheld) soon discovered that Verma had been watching her. She approached Verma and warned the man for the outrageous act, and even tried to give him a moral lesson to dissuade him from his ways. However, this did not deter Verma, and he allegedly continued to derive voyeuristic gratification as discreetly as possible. On April 28, the woman caught Verma in the act once again. She then approached his roommates, and requested them to try and persuade him against outraging her modesty. The roommates confronted Verma, and got into an argument. When the latter did not budge, they allegedly thrashed Verma and he fell unconscious.

Gender-neutral bathrooms have become a priority at The University of Minnesota-Duluth in Duluth, Minnesota, after student Blair Moses reportedly began a hunger strike. His goal? To convince the school’s administration that they are of paramount necessity. Moses allegedly stated that gender-specific bathrooms are “oppressive” and problematic, thus he took some curious avenues to ensure that more flexible facilities would be installed.

The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.

Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The Voice has obtained extremely disturbing images from New York City’s jail system. These photographs—graphically showing knife wounds and beating injuries to the faces, necks, and arms of inmates—were provided to us by Correction Department sources who want the outside world to know that violence has escalated at Rikers Island.

But the disclosure raised fears among critics that the contract is close to privatising core elements of policing: “This is the latest move that seems to be designed to make the police more and more remote from the public we serve,” said Julie Nesbit of the Police Federation. “We believe simply that if you call a cop, you should get a cop, not a security guard, not a uniformed civilian nor an employee of a major international conglomerate. We believe it’s what the public expect and believe that there should be a public debate before parts of the police service are sold off to the highest bidder.”

She pulled down his pants. She used scissors first. When they didn’t work well, she went looking for the scalpels. To keep him still, she pressed her knee onto his windpipe as she crouched over him. One cut was enough. There wasn’t a lot of blood. She thought, I am going to take it off and he’s not going to hurt anyone else. She brought her father’s penis to the stove and turned on the flame. Only the smell of flesh made what she’d done seem real to her. Her stomach lurched. She shut it off, put the burnt organ in a paper towel, and bolted from the house. Later she would throw it under the boardwalk. Thanks Jasmine

Authorities said Broten and Landrum shaved the 12-year-old girl’s hair and forced her to run up and down the hill six times on Monday night as punishment for poor grades. “The parents believed this was appropriate discipline for their daughter to teach her to not get bad grades at school,” said Lt. Michael Monsrud of Fridley.

✪ Mexican authorities investigating porn video made by 6th-graders in grade school classroom

The incident occurred in late April at a grade school in the town of Calkini, which is in a relatively conservative and heavily Indian area. Three boys are seen on the video engaging in oral and anal sex recorded on a cellphone by a fourth person, apparently another student. The mother of one of the boys saw the video on the Internet and notified authorities, Kantun said. He said the video had since been taken down. Authorities didn’t announce the students’ ages, but sixth-graders in Mexico are generally 12 or younger.

Attention, perverts: if you like kiddie porn, you’ll love New York. Probably not the slogan New York State tourism officials were hoping for, but New York has (un)-officially become the Kiddie Porn State thanks to a ruling from the New York State Court of Appeals Tuesday that determined viewing kiddie porn isn’t a crime. Possessing, producing, and distributing child erotica is still illegal (sorry, perverts), but the court decided that “possessing” kiddie porn and viewing it on the Internet are not the same thing. In other words, just because you saw smut on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s your possession, and therefore isn’t illegal under the current law.

Mahoney has been in custody since December, after prosecutors said pornographic videos showing assaults on the girl were found on the computer of a then-32-year-old Texas man. She had been charged with two counts of sexual exploitation of a child but yesterday pleaded guilty to one count. Mahoney also faces state charges of sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault and endangering the welfare of a child. The federal complaint lodged against Mahoney in January describes an approximately four-minute video streamed over the internet in which the child was lying on her stomach, apparently asleep on a bed. Mahoney then knelt beside the child and sexually abused her, the complaint said. In another incident described in the complaint, in which Mahoney allegedly recorded iPhone video while the girl was in a bathtub, Mahoney told her to “lean over sweetheart, so I can rinse you.” The girl asked “like a mermaid?” and Mahoney replied “like a mermaid, sweetheart.” Sexual abuse then ensued

Heidemarie lived nomadically, trading gardening, cleaning, and even therapy sessions for food and a place to sleep. She found it liberating: “Living without money gave me quality of life, inner wealth, and freedom.” Heidemarie has written three books about her experiences. She says the first, “The Star Money Experiment” was quite successful and she passed out all the money she earned to people on the street. She waived her advances on the other books and asked the publisher to give her royalties to charity.

Various reconstructive procedures have been attempted to restore a cosmetically acceptable phallus that would allow normal reproductive, sexual, and urinary function in patients requiring penile reconstruction. However, these procedures are limited by a shortage of native penile tissue. We previously demonstrated that a short segment of the penile corporal body can be replaced using naturally derived collagen matrices with autologous cells. In the current study, we examined the feasibility of engineering the entire pendular penile corporal bodies in a rabbit model. Neocorpora were engineered from cavernosal collagen matrices seeded with autologous cells using a multistep static/dynamic procedure, and these were implanted to replace the excised corpora. The bioengineered corpora demonstrated structural and functional parameters similar to native tissue and male rabbits receiving the bilateral implants were able to successfully impregnate females.

“The state grants a 10-yuan subsidy for amino acids to each graduating senior that will participate in the gao kao (National College Entrance Exam). Any student that feels not well can go to the infirmary and take amino acids on the IV drip,” Mr. Xia explained. He said that some students had been below par recently due to the sudden weather changes in the city of Xiaogan, and the school infirmary had been packed with students. In order to spare students the trouble of running back and forth between the infirmary and the classroom and save their time, the school decided to arrange IV drip sessions right in the classroom.

A woman who refused to leave her toilet for two-and-a-half years has spoken about why she refused to leave. Mee Yan Leong sat down on the bowl in her bathroom on March 25, 2009 and for the next 902 days, that is where she decided to eat and sleep. The 58-year-old claimed she ‘felt a force holding me down’ and said she did not understand why she felt compelled to stay in the tiled bathroom.

One dog’s backside is another man’s armpit—A little more may be revealed when we think about Paul Ehrlich’s body, or yours or mine for that matter. Human bodies have apocrine sweat glands too. Just as in dogs they are found in what biologists euphemistically call “the peri-anal region,” (or maybe that is the opposite of a euphemism) as well as around their genitals. But they are also found in our armpits. Our armpit odor is produced nearly exclusively by the odor of bacteria that are, in turn, fed by glands in our armpits4. In other words, when you sniff, however unintentionally, the odor of your neighbor’s armpits you are doing exactly the same thing a dog is doing when it sniffs another dog’s behind. This gets me back to Paul Ehrlich’s joke, the one about the good old days of sniffing each other, nose to tail.

Think about how many houses in South Florida have roofs with barrel tiles. Now imagine that each one contains thousands of squealing bats. In the video above, Miami roofers discover a particularly dense roosting area for bats. As noted by Buzzfeed, it conjures up visions of Temple of Doom. Bats are quite common in Florida. Local pest removal companies cite the most common types are the Brazilian, or Mexican Free-Tail Bat, and the Evening Bat.

A clinical trial of ”magic mushroom therapy” could take place in the UK within a year following two ground-breaking studies. Doctors plan to treat depressed patients who cannot be helped by modern drugs or behaviour-based psychotherapy with the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms. Psilocybin would slowly be infused into their bloodstreams while they receive a carefully tailored ”talking therapy”. The controversial trial is planned by Professor David Nutt, from Imperial College London, who three years ago was sacked as the Government’s chief drug adviser.

Maybury calls his vision “Social Radar.” And the comparison to traditional sensors is no accident, he tells Danger Room. “The Air Force and the Navy in this and other countries have a history of developing Sonar to see through the water, Radar to see through the air, and IR [infrared] to see through the night. Well, we also want to see into the hearts and the minds of people,” says Maybury, who serves as the top science advisor to the Air Force’s top brass. But Social Radar won’t be a single sensor to discover your secret yearnings. It’ll be more of a virtual sensor, combining a vast array of technologies and disciplines, all employed to take a society’s pulse and assess its future health. It’s part of a broader Pentagon effort to master the societal and cultural elements of war — and effort that even many in the Defense Department believe is deeply flawed. First step: mine Twitter feeds for indications of upset.

“No person or entity shall manufacture or knowingly sell food or any other product intended for human consumption which contains aborted human fetuses in the ingredients or which used aborted human fetuses in the research or development of any of the ingredients.”

Taking what they have learned over time — namely that, rightly or wrongly, people make instant judgments about faces that guide them in how they feel about that person — the scientists decided to search for a way to quantify and define exactly what it is about each person’s face that conveys a sense they can be trusted or feared. They chose those precise traits because they found they corresponded with a whole host of other vital characteristics, such as happiness and maturity. “Humans seem to be wired to look to faces to understand the person’s intentions,” said Todorov, who has spent years studying the subtleties of the simple plane containing the eyes, nose and mouth. “People are always asking themselves, ‘Does this person have good or bad intentions?'”

Michael Williams, a commissioner for Caddo Parish (which includes Shreveport), says he was horrified when he visited a local Walmart and espied a group of young miscreants “wearing pajama pants and house shoes.” He was extra-horrified when he glanced at one of the young men and noticed that “at the part where there should have been underwear” – you know the part – one of his parts in particular was allegedly “showing through the fabric.” Seems like existing law on indecent exposure should cover that, if it was really that bad, but Williams concluded further legislation was necessary. “Pajamas are designed to be worn in the bedroom at night,” said Williams, likely after extensive research on the history and design of pajamas. “If you can’t [wear them to the] courthouse, why are you going to do it in a restaurant or in public?” (Um, because those aren’t courthouses?) Williams also invoked the “slippery-slope” argument, of course. “Today it’s pajamas,” he said, “tomorrow it’s underwear.

The New York Times pointed out last month: A former nuclear engineer with three decades of experience at a major engineering firm … who has worked at all three nuclear power complexes operated by Tokyo Electric [said] “If the fuel is still inside the reactor core, that’s one thing” …. But if the fuel has been dispersed more widely, then we are far from any stable shutdown.” Indeed, if the center of the reactors are in fact relatively “cold”, it may be because most of the hot radioactive fuel has leaked out of the containment vessels and escaped into areas where it can do damage to the environment. After drilling a hole in the containment vessel of Fukushima reactor 2, Tepco cannot find the fuel. As AP notes: The steam-blurred photos taken by remote control Thursday found none of the reactor’s melted fuel …. The photos also showed inner wall of the container heavily deteriorated after 10 months of exposure to high temperature and humidity, Matsumoto said.

Hollywood appears to have peaked. If it were an ordinary industry (film cameras, say, or typewriters), it could look forward to a couple decades of peaceful decline. But this is not an ordinary industry. The people who run it are so mean and so politically connected that they could do a lot of damage to civil liberties and the world economy on the way down. It would therefore be a good thing if competitors hastened their demise. That’s one reason we want to fund startups that will compete with movies and TV, but not the main reason. The main reason we want to fund such startups is not to protect the world from more SOPAs, but because SOPA brought it to our attention that Hollywood is dying. They must be dying if they’re resorting to such tactics. If movies and TV were growing rapidly, that growth would take up all their attention. When a striker is fouled in the penalty area, he doesn’t stop as long as he still has control of the ball; it’s only when he’s beaten that he turns to appeal

The U.S. military’s struggling to prevent counterfeit goods from infiltrating their supply chains. Now, they’re considering a novel approach to give legit wares a mark of distinction: embed them with strands of plant DNA. Working with a sub-contract from the Defense Logistics Agency, researchers at Applied DNA Sciences Inc. have figured out how to create unique DNA “signatures” out of plant genomes. A DNA-marked coating can then be applied to just about anything, from circuit boards to microchips to routers. Once embedded, the DNA can be detected in one of two ways: A handheld scanner that can instantly spot the DNA strand, or a forensic analysis that requires a swab of the mark. So as a product moves through the supply chain, it’d be checked for authenticity every step of the way.

31-year-old Alexander Aan faces a maximum prison sentence of five years for posting “God does not exist” on Facebook. The civil servant was attacked and beaten by an angry mob of dozens who entered his government office at the Dharmasraya Development Planning Board on Wednesday. The Indonesian man was taken into protective police custody Friday since he was afraid of further physical assault. The posting was made on a Facebook Page titled Ateis Minang (Minang Atheist), which Aan created. At the time of writing, it had over 1,700 Likes. Aan’s posting has been removed, but supporters on the Page are urging police to release him.

In short, it confirms the intentions of key insiders– including former NSA/CIA head Michael Hayden, former Rep. Jane Harmon, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, 9/11 Commissioners Philip Zelikow and Richard Ben-Viniste, former National Security Advisor Samuel Berger and others– to flesh out a plan we have already seen developing from an outside perspective– namely, to build a domestic Stasi-like force to takeover, monitor and control the population. Moreover, the media has reported on this changed mission– towards the full spectrum domination of the people under a patently-fascist framework– with the same calm as the weekly weather forecast.

The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases. The convoluted decision (.pdf) in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle was not a search. The government had told the high court that it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant. “We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority. The majority declined to say whether that search was unreasonable and required a warrant.

Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21–or face the consequences including contempt of court. Blackburn, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled that the Fifth Amendment posed no barrier to his decryption order. The Fifth Amendment says that nobody may be “compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which has become known as the right to avoid self-incrimination.

✖ Russian scientist claims signs of life spotted on Venus

Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during a 1982 during a mission to explore the heavily acid-clouded planet. Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, but it has a thick atmosphere dominated by carbon dioxide. With an atmospheric pressure 92 times Earth’s, a waterless and volcano-riddled surface and a surface temperature of 894 degrees, the planet has never been considered a serious target of research into the possibility of extraterrestrial life. But in his article, published in the magazine Solar System Research, Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a “disk,” a “black flap” and a “scorpion.”

They say that a psychic technique called remote viewing allows people to take an armchair visit to other planets. The mind-travelers draw images of alien-looking things that are supposedly transmitted from a definitely out-of-body experience (potentially) millions of miles from Earth. In the 1960s, when psychoactive drugs became widely popular, I assumed that claims of tripping to other worlds were purely imaginary. Consider this remote viewing experience reported in a discussion forum: “…i relaxed in my chair, and pointed myself up there. I saw 6 or seven aliens looking right at me grinning and smiling. they had red eyes like the reddit alien but no antenna. As soon as I saw these creatures i immediately felt hurt ..

A tip from an anonymous amateur unmanned-aerial-vehicle pilot is what led Texas authorities to open a major criminal investigation into the waste practices of a Dallas meat packing plant. The Environmental Protection Agency, The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), and Texas Parks and Wildlife are investigating whether a Dallas meat packing plant was sending its wastewater to a local river after images from an amateur UAV pilot showed a river behind the plant “full of blood.” The Columbia Meat packing plant sits along a creek that runs into the Trinity River.

Filesonic, one of the Internet’s leading cyberlocker services, has taken some drastic measures following the Megaupload shutdown and arrests last week. In addition to discontinuing its affiliates rewards program and not yet paying accrued money to members, the site has disabled all sharing functionality, leaving users only with access to their own files.

An Arkansas campaign manager says he came home Sunday and found his family’s cat fatally bludgeoned on his front steps – with the word “liberal” scrawled across its side. According to a statement from Democratic congressional candidate Ken Aden’s campaign, Jacob Burris’ cat had been hit so violently that one of its eyeballs “was barely hanging from its socket.” The incident shook Burris, who expressed concerns about the safety of his children. “I knew what we were getting into running in this district, but when you have four children, it makes you feel vulnerable,” he told the Daily News. “It’s a very red district… you see billboards all over the place with Democratic senators’ names and the hammer and sickle on some of them, calling them socialists.”

The leader of a new left-wing party in Poland threatened to light up a joint in Parliament on Friday — but just burned incense instead. Janusz Palikot is campaigning to get soft drugs legalized and to otherwise liberalize the conservative country. “We’re trying to get into room 143 to burn some grass, in accordance with our announcement,” Palikot told reporters in a news conference held in his Parliament office.